From a preeminent historian, the definitive history of the sixteenth-century uprising that revolutionized Europe.
The German Peasants’ War was the greatest popular uprising in Western Europe before the French Revolution. In 1524 and 1525, it swept across Germany with astonishing speed as well over a hundred thousand people massed in armed bands to demand a new and more egalitarian order. The peasants took control of vast areas of southern and middle Germany, torching and plundering the monasteries, convents, and castles that stood in their way. But they proved no match for the forces of the lords, who put down the revolt by slaying somewhere between seventy and a hundred thousand peasants in just over two months.
In Summer of Fire and Blood, the first history of the German Peasants’ War in a generation, historian Lyndal Roper exposes the far-reaching ramifications of this rebellion. Though the war’s victors portrayed the uprising as naive and inchoate, Roper reveals a mass movement that sought to make good on the radical potential of the Protestant Reformation. By recovering what the people themselves felt and believed, Summer of Fire and Blood reconstructs the thrilling, tragic story of the peasants’ fight to change the world.
The German Peasants’ War was the greatest popular uprising in Western Europe before the French Revolution. In 1524 and 1525, it swept across Germany with astonishing speed as well over a hundred thousand people massed in armed bands to demand a new and more egalitarian order. The peasants took control of vast areas of southern and middle Germany, torching and plundering the monasteries, convents, and castles that stood in their way. But they proved no match for the forces of the lords, who put down the revolt by slaying somewhere between seventy and a hundred thousand peasants in just over two months.
In Summer of Fire and Blood, the first history of the German Peasants’ War in a generation, historian Lyndal Roper exposes the far-reaching ramifications of this rebellion. Though the war’s victors portrayed the uprising as naive and inchoate, Roper reveals a mass movement that sought to make good on the radical potential of the Protestant Reformation. By recovering what the people themselves felt and believed, Summer of Fire and Blood reconstructs the thrilling, tragic story of the peasants’ fight to change the world.
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Reviews
A riveting account of a seismic event in German history which conveys a real sense of why so many ordinary people thought they could change the world. Lyndal Roper writes beautifully and displays a compassionate understanding for the protagonists on both sides of this complex and bloody struggle
Truly extraordinary - Lyndal Roper is a breath-taking storyteller. Her explosive reassessment of the Peasants' War is a theological, ecological, and social epic. She shows why the chaotic violence, symbolic arsenal of brotherhood, and maze of dreams and visions should matter to us in the twenty-first century
An extraordinary and brilliant book. In Lyndal Roper's evocatively beautiful, crystal-clear prose, the complex landscapes of early sixteenth-century Germany - physical, psychological, spiritual, social and political - unfold before our eyes. She shows us the dreams and deeds that shaped the Peasants' War, the greatest popular revolt in western Europe before the French Revolution, and the ways in which that war shaped the future that followed. This is a profound account of an attempt to change the world, a sensational narrative that is both human and humane, illuminating, resonant and unsettling